Today will see the opening of Dragana Jurišić’s exhibition My Own Unknown at the Gallery of Photography in Temple Bar. This extremely personal work is made up of a huge array of media and tackles very complex themes such as exile, politics and betrayal within a family history. Working in photography, video, text, along with showing appropriated images and personal notebooks, the exhaustive project is divided into five chapters that tackle universal themes and conceptions, both real and imaginary, of female identity, especially that of the “woman as muses” portrayed in western culture.
Through different voices and mediums, Jurišić begins by recounting the story of her aunt’s disappearance from rural Yugoslavia in the 1950s and her mysterious death in Paris in the 1980s. The second chapter tells of an unknown woman whose body was rescued from the Seine river and brings a female perspective to notions of beauty, authenticity and truth. Then follows a collection of 100 photographs that were a part of a response to an open call and which challenge the stereotype of the passive muse so frequently a subject of Western art over the centuries.
The fourth chapter continues this theme, with depictions of Greek goddesses such as Gaia and Mnemosyne and the Nine Muses. The following and final chapter culminates in a conclusion of the narrative in which the leading protagonists are brought together and merge.
Although currently based in Ireland, Jurišić was originally from Slavonski Brod in Yugoslavia (now Croatia). Jurišić is drawn to the permanent and documentary qualities of photography. In her words, “the act of photographing, of looking at the world through the camera lens, to help provide a semblance of control over an otherwise unpredictable world”. Since graduating with a PhD from the European Centre for Photographic Research in Wales in 2013, Jurišić has earned much success across Europe, most notably with Special Recognition from the Dorothea Lange and Paul Taylor Prize and the Emerging Visual Artist Award. Currently she is an artist in residence at the Irish Museum of Modern Art studios, Dublin.
There will be outdoor projections exhibited at 8pm in Meeting House square this evening.
